I picked up on this handy tool through chatting with a colleague I met doing the PGCert, Dr.Cai Wilkinsonfrom the School of Government and Society.

Diigo (www.diigo.com) is a social bookmarking, web annotation and collaborative research service. Basically, you sign up for an account and can then share resources online by bookmarking them with Diigo. You can tag them as you would on a blog or use the Diigo toolbar to highlight portions or add sticky notes to pages.

You can set up and join groups, allowing others to comment on and add to your repository.

You can link your profile to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and LastFM, among others. It also syncs with delicious.

Of course, the question is: how useful is this and in what ways? There is clearly *lots* of potential for encouraging collaborative working. My interest would be in using it for information literacy training and at the moment I’m not sure how this would work, particularly given that I might only see a group of students once or twice.

Also, I can see pockets of resistance to yet another piece of technology – unless students can see a particular value or incentive to using it. Why should they use a new technology when they can already happily share links via email or Facebook message?

Reservations aside, I’m quite taken with Diigo and I’d be interested to see if anyone has any thoughts on how it might be used in IL.

I’ve found one small caveat in using Diigo. The full toolbar has occasionally caused my IE browser to crash. Other users appear to have had this problem, but Diigo say that the toolbar is compatible with IE so it might be that other add-ons I’ve got are causing the problem. Anyway, I’ve replaced the toolbar with Diigolet – a small button which has the same basic functions as the toolbar (highlight, bookmark, etc).